So ubisoft has put out a fairly vacuous press release about some LLM project of theirs which, I understand, has gotten some positive buzz in industry circles
I'm going to level with you, I'd be embarrassed to publish a screenshot plastered all over with text that is this bad. This is bad even for LLM output; I don't know if or which parts of this are human-written (maybe the 'goals' are human-written and form part of the prompt?) but they are truly dire. This is bad for a tech demo, this is bad for placeholder text.
Publicly praising this stuff or attaching your name to it, in my mind, puts you somewhere on the rube-grifter spectrum... like what's the outcome you think you want here? That you're left after Ubisoft throws the discarded husks of your colleagues in the trash? Or are you not even thinking about that and are of such a bovine disposition that you're going to praise the company dogfood right up to the day when they shove you into the meat grinder?
I try to bring empathy and generosity of spirit to bear on the individual workers who make it work in this profoundly stupid, benighted industry. But nothing makes me angrier than seeing alleged 'creatives' go to bat for their own disposability.
Everyone talking about this concept seems to think its something fresh and new and unprecedented but modders have been doing this for at least a year now. There are several mods that work in exactly the same way anyone suggesting this for "triple-A" videogames would implement it: the game gives you a text or speech-to-text input that gets sent to ChatGPT or some other LLM via an API call, with a prompt injected about the gameworld, the character's background and personality, any available context, etc. Predictably the NPC responses are anodyne, sterile, overly formal and filled with vapid positivity. Around the campfire on a starry night you ask Lydia what being a housekarl is like and she blurts out an essay on the complexities and nuances of balancing her duties with her emotions and desires like she's a first-year psychiatry student psychoanalysing herself. You ask her to help you solve a trivial puzzle in an ancient nordic ruin and she gets the answer wrong over and over and over again. Characters dump their life stories on you at the slightest provocation, answer your context-specific questions with irrelevant exposition about the game world, and don't remember the things you've done together.
These videos keep pretending like this is some kind of complex, difficult or technically intensive technology and that they're cobbling this basic version together to show the potential, but enthusiastic amateurs have already built them and they suck in exactly the way you expect.
